Talk:Gleaming Repentance (5e Equipment)

Hey all!

I wanted to create a magic item that has the effect this one does. I was stuck between either a "religious" item (like this finger) or something like a gambler's deck of cards, and I finally decided to write this one out. "What level of PC would you give this item to?" I have no idea!! :D I have no history of making weapons or stat blocks of creatures, so, use this as you wish! I thought about making the odd roll effect be the wielder receives half the damage they inflicted, but I feel like that's kind of cheatsy, for as long as you roll even numbers, you have the OPTION of either continuing or ending the attack.

As always, let me know what you guys think! Much love.

--Grass (talk) 10:19, 18 December 2021 (MST)

Looks interesting, but I do not believe this item is balanced.

I forget what exact math theorem it is, but when you have something that is 50%, and you get to continue rolling if you hit that 50%, the average result is that whenever activated, you get an average of one successful 50% roll as the scaling nature of continuing to roll when you hit a 50% makes the result infinitely close to one successful 50% roll. So anyway, I will judge the item based on this, and its potential to deal even more damage. On the baseline, this item is terrible for a very rare item. Really even with the average of dealing 1d8 bonus damage on the attack, the item is a comparatively better high damage dealing cantrip that has the potential do deal a ton of extra damage. The potential to deal a ton of bonus damage is nice, but with infinite things, you really need some maximum amount (3/4?). In addition, negative effects like damage to yourself are considered null for balancing things in 5e. You can have negative effects, but it is usually better to design stuff without them. Finally, this item is quite flavorful, but it needs to do other things besides just damage. --Blobby383b (talk) 20:17, 18 December 2021 (MST)

Hey Blobby383b! I appreciate you giving my item a look! :)

Unfortunately, the math theorem thing didn't make much sense to me. But to address your other concerns: what is a weapon if not a fancy damaging cantrip!? (Sarcasm aside,) I want to keep the possibly-infinite damage scaling on the item and balance it out with the self-damage. I don't think I've heard people say that negative effects on magic items are null on the balancing scale, so I want to know what your reasoning is behind that--maybe I'm missing something. Like I said, I'm kind of new to creating items/stats. Let me know what you think!

--Grass (talk) 21:14, 18 December 2021 (MST)

My explanation may be to blame on the math theorem thing, but all you need to know is the result is that you, on average, successfully trigger the bonus damage once each time you activate it, despite the chance of triggering the bonus damage being 50%. As for this item itself, this is a wondrous item not a weapon as magic weapons are specifically ammunition or actual mundane weapons that are magical. The need for a cap on infinite things is that you can not balance the item well based on the average as the item's power level varies too much because it can go infinite. In addition to that, self-damage can be avoided by having resistance or immunity to a damage type or all damage among other ways. That is beside the point though, as 5e in general was designed in a way to heavily avoid negative effects and not consider them in terms of balance. For some more info on negative effects in general in 5e, a few races printed early in the edition used to have negative ability scores (orc, kobold), but they were edited out in future printings, classes do not ever receive negative features, and 1st party cursed items in the DMG are balanced around the item's rarity and ignores the item having a curse. The decision to design 5e this way was made as in 3.5e, the fact that you could have negative features led to a large number of balance issues and other problems (off the top of my head, in particular a large number of races had negative ability scores that could be used as dump stats and high other ability scores). --Blobby383b (talk) 22:17, 18 December 2021 (MST)

So it's been a couple months since this item was last messed with, and I had some time to take another look at it. The only thing I think that could break this item would be if a player had an undead character or had some other form of necrotic damage acting as healing; it'd be a no-brainer to give Gleaming Repentance to that character in the party, as they could use it constantly and without penalty. Thus, I added the two levels of exhaustion, and I'm thinking about making it so the item shatters irreparably after this negative effect occurs three times. Doing so would ensure that the party can't constantly reroll an undead character or something else that heals from necrotic damage and hand the item off to them to be a constant no-drawbacks nuke in combat.

DMs beware, I suppose. If you believe this item to be too overpowered, so be it--just don't use it lol.

--Grass (talk) 11:05, 1 March 2022 (MST)